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The evolution of the number of Salafists praying rooms in Catalonia is the best proof of it. In the last four years their number has doubled. In 2004, they had 15, concentrated for the most part in Tarragona, nowadays they control between 27 and 30 mosques and their area of influence has extended itself to Lleida and Girona, according to the authorities. In Barcelona, their presence is still not very important.

Salafists build new mosques or make their way into an already existing one to achieve their expansion goals. Their method is simple. First, they try to convince the imam of letting them organise activities inside the mosque like readings or conferences about Islam. If he is not very favourable to that, they discredit him before the rest of the Muslims accusing him of not knowing correctly Islamic doctrine. They tell the believers that the Quram states the obligation of chaging the imam if he is not the adequate one, because if not, the praying is void.

Salafists themselves state that they control much more mosques than 30. "There are more than 50 salafist mosques in Catalonia", Said Hamduni says. He is the coordinator of the Reus mosque and one of the most active leaders of this "trend" in Catalonia. "I'm Salafist", he admits with pride and insists that "Salafism is the true Islam". "We follow literally Mahoma's teachings. If something is not written in the Quram or in the Hadiths, we don't consider it as valid", Hamduni explains.

5 comments:

"Salafism is the true Islam". Actually Wahhabism is the true Islam. The Taliban is the true Islam. But the Salafists are almost right on the money. Whatever happened to the "moderate" Muslims who tried to deny or reinterpret the violent verses in the Koran and who were happy to just practice their religion without feeling the need to take over the world and overrun every civilized society on the planet? Oh yeah, the Salafis, the Wahhabis, and the Taliban killed them all.

Because Islam is inherently fundamentalist and ascetic (with the exception of sex, in which case it is excessive for recruitment purposes) so that one does not enjoy life or any real relationship with other human beings in lieu of a bond with Allah and a love of death. Islam is inherently radical, extreme, and intolerant (since it is explicitly to never be reformed), and the Wahhabis are the most radical, extreme, intolerant, fundamentalist, and (theroretically) ascetic. Muslims are supposed to rally against and kill those who they believe to not be good enough Muslims before the non-Muslims, and the Wahhabis do that. They've picked off almost every Shiite mosque in Pakistan, for example, although messing with Iran would prove tactless because Iran has always been the brain of Islam. Where Sufis are the heart, Shiites are the brain, but when they're Pakis there's simply no reason to keep them around for obvious reasons. Wahhabism also conducts huge dawa campaigns, in terms of funding both violent and stealth jihad. Islam is never to beget anything other than more Islam. Saudi Arabia is the perfect example of a country where that has never been anything but the case. Sadly, the Wahhabis have it right.

No other religion has ever ruled that reforming or reinterpreting its doctrine (bit'a) is the equivalent of apostacy or heresy (whose distinction seems to be pretty arbitrary as far as I can tell). The Koran is very clear about the importance of keeping its doctrine "pure." Christianity, for example, has several books. I choose to keep the Gospels and trash the rest, since I could do without Revelations or Paul's sexist letters which contradict Jesus. Islam is also a very OCD doctrine, whereas other religions are far less strict in terms of their obligations. Islam is a cult with extremely radical views about racial supremacy, misogyny, totalitarianism, colonialism, and killing generally. Other religions are religions, based on morality, and it's immoral to try to control people's beliefs, thoughts, or lives generally, let alone the world around them so that "morality" is imposed upon them like in Islam. They let you believe what you want. You can be a Jew for Jesus or your own denomination of Christianity. And nobody kills you for leaving or accuses you of apostacy for reinterpreting the doctrine, then kills you.

I will grant you, however, that Islam is not what it was in the 7th century. The Koran wasn't even put together until the 9th century, and it's so ridiculously nonsensical, repetitive, and pointless that it requires a Hadith and a Sira to understand it. And Sharia laws weren't assembled until the 10th century. But Islam hasn't changed a bit since the 10the century, probably because anyone who tried to produce new non-jihadist scholarship on it got hanged or exiled.

Oh yeah, and I'm jdamn13 again. My LJ account is messed up, probably since I haven't logged in in forever.